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When SWIFT messages are utilized in bank heists like the 2016 Bangladesh Bank attack, reports often refer to SWIFT having been “hacked.” In reality, it’s the banks themselves that have had their cybersecurity flaws exposed, and the SWIFT network was only used as a tool for the fraudsters to gain the trust of the financial institutions that are performing the transfers. This might seem like a small nit to pick, but in some ways it’s an important distinction to draw. Why? Because it centers “trust” as one of the most important elements of both successful fraud and successful fraud prevention.

SWIFT fraud is on the rise. In a recent EastNets survey of 200 of the roughly 11,000 financial institutions on the SWIFT network, 80% of respondents said they had experienced at least one attempt at SWIFT fraud in the three-plus years since the infamous Bangladesh Bank heist. In Asia, that number is closer to 100%, and the number across the board is probably somewhat higher than that—given that only 40% of the banks surveyed were “very confident” that they were successfully detecting every fraud attempt on their network.

Every year, the bar for SWIFT CSP compliance gets pitched a little bit higher. For 2020, a number of advisory controls were upgraded to mandatory, including a control related to shrinking the threat surface in banking organizations through application hardening. This is a wise tactic: as attackers carrying out fraudulent transactions get more sophisticated, financial institutions need to do the same when it comes to information security. At the same time, it’s not clear that increased mandatory advisories will be enough to stem the year-over-year increase in SWIFT CSP fraud.